Word: cheech
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STONED PEOPLE WILL laugh at almost anything. You can make them giggle by stumbling around, and crack them up completely by falling down. Comedy team Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong are clearly counting on the undiscerning tastes of high audiences to save their new movie, Up in Smoke, from the outright failure it deserves. The ads for the movie warn you not to go "straight" to see this movie, but if you have any semblance of rational thought left in your head by the time you hit the theater you'll undoubtedly look around and wonder why you wasted good...
...that dope and all that goes with it is not potentially funny--far from it. Yet Cheech and Chong, who wrote as well as starred in the movie, just don't seem to know how to tap the possible sources of humor. The laughs are too easy, too cheap, too shallow--it seems as if they got high one day and wrote up the movie in a couple of hours, but forgot to double check and see if it was funny when they regained their normal states of consciousness. All the obvious jokes are there--people stumbling around, people eating...
...fair, there are a few good scenes in the movie and even an attempted plot. In fact, there's probably even enough material for a good ten minute short. As the film opens, Pedro (Cheech) rises from his couch as his kids play on him, around him, under him. Staggering into the bathroom, he begins to urinate, and upon closer examination finds that what he thought was the toilet is the clothes hamper. Immediately the tone of the whole movie...
...ANYWAY, CHEECH AND CHONG spend a lot of time driving around Los Angeles freeways, smoking dope, urinating, saying "Man," and looking for women. In the meantime they start a rock band and win a contest at the Roxy, get deported to Tijuana, avoid several attempted busts, drive a large green van entirely built out of marijuana across the border to Beverly Hills, and smoke a lot of dope. They dominate the movie, wooden as they are, by refusing to put any other characters in the film, using instead a loosely constructed set of stereotypes and caricatures to fill...
...come paying high theater prices expecting to see a play, who are shocked and involuntarily titillated by the uninhibited use of words they have only read in print and even then disguised by asterisks. But for a generation of college students nurtured on National Lampoon, Lenny Bruce and Cheech & Chong, The London Madhouse Company despite all the hyperbolic publicity, will seem quite tame and a bit on the dreary side...